Spring has sprung, I’ve had my yearly ski trip a bit later than usual and decided it’s about time to start being a bit more religious on the ‘ol bloggosphere. As many of you may know we’ve been working hard on a new subsidiary for the company that is going to have it’s official launch shortly, it’s a bit of a new direction for us and mum is still the world, but no doubt you’ll hear about it first here. So apologies if the attention has been a bit off blogging for the last number of months, it’s now fully back where it should be and hopefully there will be some exciting developments coming up very shortly… you can tell I’m really bursting to let everyone know, however, like the man in the advert, shtop shtop, this larger’s not ready yet. Except, it’s not larger, it’s IT stuff… hmmm.
Okay, so on my hols lately I’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of technology on the slopes – I can get full 3G coverage, so thanks for everyone who called me and emailed… bet you other than dialtone of questionable sexuality (le beeeep, le beeeep, don’t know why the French can’t just use ours), you didn’t even know I was away… haha! We’ve all got RFID cards strapped to us, going through skidata (of car park barrier fame too) turnstiles and there’s a large amount of people pretending to be Teletubbies with things mounted on their heads… which turned out to be cameras.
I’m instantly skeptical about such things, but one of our group had a GoPro helmet mounted camera and it provided hours of amusement … imagine why you watch Formula One, for the crashes – imagine if you can do the same with your skiing buddies, that’s what these things do. If I was sporty enough, I’d probably go for one of them, but noticed Engaget had a nice comparison with the Contour+, a competing model. I can’t help but think, afraid there’s a Cisco rant coming… why the hell did Cisco bin the Flip cameras!!!
I’d say in my view really, Contour+ you look like a cyborg, GoPro you look like a teletubby. It’s pretty much like that, one seems to be on your head the other is to the side. I was more blown away by the image qualty that these things were churning out, even without any stability harnesses or anything like that. Has certainly been a while since I’ve seen something that’s impressed me like that. My main worry is those things would certainly catch any red-blooded male out from looking at stuff their other halves wouldn’t like them looking at!
I already own a Polar heart rate monitor watch, I tended to think this is about as techy as sports should go – the GPS smartphone tracking of runs or cycle routes is probably a bit much for me. However, with that in mind too – in the Portes du Soleil ski region, you can also download an app that will give you the full area map and GPS track where you are and where you’ve been on the slopes, give you snow reports and let you see the web cams to see if there’s any snow on the tops without having to get up from your apres-ski induced morning haze.
Perhaps there’s cause for a bit of unified communications between a GoPro, a Polar Heart Rate monitor and GPS along with a new style dating website… PATENT PENDING readers…. brings a whole new area to crowd sourcing!
Still though, I’d rather have a Roger Moore-Style Canary Yellow Ski-Suit and a Union Flag parachute than any sports type gadget.
